Obama’s Next Move: the Global Warming Tax

This week the United Nations beginstwo weeks of climate talks in Doha, Qatar. The primary goal of these meetings is to draw President Obama into accepting a redistribution plan designed extract money from the U.S. economy in the form of a global warming tax and doling out the cash to Third World nations.

“There will be expectations from countries to hear a new voice from the United States,” said Jennifer Morgan, director of the climate and energy program at the World Resources Institute in Washington.

The meeting in Qatar’s capital will focus on ramping up what is described as “climate financing for poor nations.” American leadership is considered crucial to these plans.

“We need the U.S. to engage even more,” said European Union Climate Commissioner Connie Hedegaard. “Because that can change the dynamic of the talks.”

And carrying the water in support of this global scheme are the media, selecting their talking points from a recent World Bank report claiming global temperatures are likely to increase by more than 6 degrees, leading to “extreme heat waves, declining global food stocks, loss of ecosystems and biodiversity, and life-threatening sea level rise.”

Given that since 1850 the earth’s temperature has only warmed 1.2 degrees (with88 percent of that warming occurring before 1940), and that the global average temperature has not risen since 1998, a six-degree hike flies in the face scientific sanity.

The lame duck Obama administration will likely be all over this UN plan. As a U.S. senator in 2008, Obama sponsored a bill known as the “Global Poverty Act.” The bill would have made levels of U.S. foreign aid spending subservient to the dictates of the United Nations.

Joe Biden, then chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, was a vocal supporter of the legislation which would commit the U.S. to spending 0.7 percent of gross national product on foreign aid, which amounts to a phenomenal 13-year total of $845 billion over and above what the U.S. already spends.

A release from the Obama Senate office about the bill declared, “In 2000, the U.S. joined more than 180 countries at the United Nations Millennium Summit and vowed to reduce global poverty by 2015… it is time the United States makes it a priority of our foreign policy to meet this goal and help those who are struggling day to day.”

Obama’s bill would have required the president “to develop and implement a comprehensive strategy to further the United States foreign policy objective of promoting the reduction of global poverty, [and] the elimination of extreme global poverty…”

The primary vehicle for such a redistribution plan would be a tax or fee on businesses that produce carbon dioxide as a byproduct of their activities. This could include power plants, refineries, cement manufacturers, and dairy farmers. Those increased costs of production would be passed along to the consumer in the form of higher prices.

A tax on carbon dioxide would also be seen by politicians as a way to offset our severe budget deficit and staggering national debt. It would be sold to the American public in the name of saving the planet.

Obama may be another step closer to realizing his 2008 dream of massive global wealth redistribution.